


locked in a haze

by x (ordinary)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Ficlet, Gen, Lyrium Addiction, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 11:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5088782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The red burns so sweet and bright and terrible: the coming storm, the coming home, the ship in the harbor. He hates it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	locked in a haze

**Author's Note:**

> [Stay High - Tove Lo, Against the Current cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLi303KdUE)
> 
> What if Meredith was a narcotrafficker? What if Tempars were a loyal family that dipped into the drug supply for ensured docility? What if they used those gifted with creating the fickle mixture that is Lyrium as little more than indentured servants, taken from their families and lives? 
> 
> And what if Samson was cast out to help them?

Tube tied taut, circulation paused, needle to the vein: it flows in and in and in, catching him in the riptide and down he tumbles, through the rabbit hole. Senses sharpening, mind dulling, embracing oblivion. The red burns so sweet and bright and terrible: the coming storm, the coming home, the ship in the harbor. He hates it.

Samson feels like he’s come home as he comes  **up** , spiraling towards rage and adrenaline and everything that makes the heart go thud-thud, thud-thud, the creature that pumps blood into his sorry veins, into the pockmarked soft of the elbow, back into his useless fucking heart. 

Lyrium, the red stuff. One part nostalgia, two parts shame. But that is for later, tucked away until the dead of night after the high drains from his body like blood from a corpse, until he has time to think on his sins and how he got here to start, until he grows indignant from the unfairness of it all because he’d never  _asked for this_.

But, for now: the spots burn bright like shooting stars. Veins twist around and around, and if they could come loose they’d wrap twice around his neck in a noose. Instead: Samson slumps against the wall, cool to heated skin, pressing face to brick. 

Kirkwall’s night time chill seeps into skin, blooming plumes of frost melting from a touch. 

Crawling in a skin barely his own. Wants it off off  **off**. Tear it off and become anew, tear it off and perish, tear it off and stitch himself back together, poorly. A bunch of useless scraps that cannot be redeemed. 

(Thoughts of his own design. Be easier if it was the Lyrium.)

Samson barks laughter, breath emerging from rattling lungs in a fog. He’s halves where he should be a whole. Not enough nails in the world to pin it together again. A butterfly in a box still struggling to live, too afraid to die, on display. A living lesson.

 _Don’t do what he did._ Don’t betray the cause.  _It could happen to you_. 

He closes his eyes, sweat slick on his brow. The high fades, leaving behind a sudden sense of grief and loss, the cold filtering back into his marrow. All of this to help a victim of a hierarchy devoted to destruction, with intents to bind into indentured servitude. All of this for  _betrayal_ stinging fresh, years later, Rutherford’s loyalties still devoted to a structure both terrible and immense. Indoctrinated.

All of this, and Samson just can’t stop doing whatever it takes for the next syringe. 


End file.
